Arthur Edward Jeune Collins (1885 – 1914) held the record of the highest score in cricket for 116 years. As a 13-year-old schoolboy, he scored 628 not out over four afternoons in June 1899 in an inter-house match at Clifton College, where he was a pupil. Despite this achievement, Collins never played first-class cricket. The record was eclipsed in January 2016 when an Indian boy, Pranav Dhanawade, scored 1009 in a single innings. This page presents a few more details about Collins’ famous achievement.
First, an excellent booklet about Collins, his life, his cricket and his tragic death in World War I.
This is a view of the magnificent Close Ground, Clifton College, immortalised in the first line of Vitaï Lampada, a famous poem by John Newbold
“There’s a breathless hush in the Close to-night”
This ground has been used by Gloucestershire for 96 first-class matches between 1871 and 1932 and has witnessed 13 of W. G. Grace’s first-class hundreds.
A fitting site for the record – maybe, but this was not quite where the innings was played…
Rather, it was around the corner in the very thin strip of field to the right of the photograph, beyond the school buildings and the hard-surface tennis court and alongside the church. It is now known as Collins’ Piece and is still used for sport, but is far too small for a cricket match in modern times. Five-a-side football is more normal.
The black oval approximately indicates the location of Collins’ Piece. It lies alongside the Guthrie Road, behind a medium-sized wall. It can easily be viewed by passers-by.
A screenshot of Collins’ Piece from the grounds of the church taken from Google Streetview. The old building is the junior school. In the foreground is an ivy-topped wall which carries this plaque, unveiled in 1962:
The wicket itself was near the barely visible line, which is the halfway line of a five-a-side football field. The two straight boundaries only extended around 20 yards beyond the stumps and reaching them only earned two runs, with one exception – the sloping roofs you can just about see straight on are fives courts and beyond them was a swimming pool – to hit the ball into the pool earned six. The boundary to the right was 70 yards away, and sixes could be scored there as well by clearing the wall – I am not sure if a hit along the ground to this boundary counted as two or four. To the left, the land continued for a considerable distance, and runs in this area had to be run in full.
The previous record for the highest score was held by A.E. Stoddart – in 1886, he scored 485 in 370 minutes for Hampstead against Stoics, all after spending the entire night before the game playing poker. Stoddard later became England’s captain. After Collins’s feat, seven other scores of over 500 have been recorded:
- 31-year-old Australian Test cricketer Charles Eady came close to breaking the record, when he made 566 for Break-o’-Day against Wellington in Hobart in less than eight hours spread over three weeks in March 1902.
- JC Sharp – Melbourne GS v Geelong College, Melbourne, 1914 ; 502 not out
- Dadabhoy Havewala – Bombay Baroda & Central India Railways v St Xavier’s College, Mumbai – 1933 – 515
- Malhotra Chamanlal – Mohindra College, Patiala, v Government College – 1956 – 502 not out
- Prithvi Shaw – for Rizvi Springfield in a Harris Shield match – 2013 – 546
- Brian Lara set the record for the highest individual score in first-class cricket, with 501 not out for Warwickshire against Durham at Edgbaston in 1994
- Pranav Dhanawade, a 15-year-old Indian boy who scored 1,009 not out from 323 balls for KC Gandhi School against Arya Gurukul School on 4 and 5 January 2016 in Mumbai. He is yet to play first-class cricket.
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